Part of the Series

Challenging the Corporate University

I have been teaching for over 10 years, and yet I find myself packing my boxes of books once more; I have reached the end of yet another temporary academic contract, and I’m about to dive headfirst into the unknown. I feel like the embodiment of the twelfth tarot card, the Hanged Man. How did I end up here, upside down again?

I admit, nearly everyone in academia in North America (and likely the world) is feeling some flavor of career panic: national funding has either been cancelled or is under threat, visas and legal status are or will be questioned, institutions both private and public face economic turmoil, many people have been “let go” to balance budgets. Recent anti-DEI legislation limits the structure and functionality of departments, student programs, and individual faculty positions — further isolating students and faculty of color and those with other marginalized identities.

In this political climate, the speech and social media posts of teachers are not only monitored and censored, but their free speech often results in job termination, including a recent sweep of instructors across the nation who were fired for expressing their reactions to the Charlie Kirk murder. Many institutions made broad cuts to programs, departments, and jobs this spring and summer to keep up with budget cuts; according to a recent article from Inside Higher Ed, nearly a thousand employees lost their jobs through major institutional cuts, with the striking example of Ivy Tech Community College, which laid off 202 employees this past May.

Every day, there is a new crisis — whether it’s political, social, environmental. Natural disasters fueled by the climate crisis, violence and hunger in Gaza, threats to reproductive health care, heightened policing of gendered bathrooms — the list proliferates. In academia, the burden is particularly heavy on temporary adjunct faculty who must juggle two jobs simultaneously: teaching full time and applying for the next gig. Short-term contracts, low pay, and heavy workloads limit the scholarship potential and pedagogical effectiveness of temporary faculty. Ideally, all faculty could pay full attention to their students’ needs during all this chaos, but most adjuncts are only able to survive the hustle, and the unfortunate consequence is that students’ educational experience is also compromised.

Temporary faculty aren’t given enough time or resources to set up research labs, advise students, or lead field trips and study abroad semesters, and we most often only overlap with students for a portion of their four years of college. Adjuncts also literally do more work than permanent faculty as they make up a greater percentage of the workforce, and the course loads are higher across the board for adjuncts and visiting professors than for tenured faculty. Women and underrepresented minority faculty are disproportionately awarded more temporary positions than cisgender white men.

These unequal labor practices and protections threaten not only the livelihoods of faculty, but also reduce each academic institution’s ability to deliver on their educational promises to students and society. Consider this disparity: roughly 70 percent of faculty at higher ed institutions are contingent (including lecturers, adjunct professors, fellows, and similar non-tenure-track faculty), yet in 2023, the national average tenured faculty salary was $138,142 (an average across 2,177 institutions), nearly double the average salary for lecturers of $73, 810. This imbalance has created an exploited class of workers in higher education; contingent faculty do most of the work with little reward or security.

Short-term contracts, low pay, and heavy workloads limit the scholarship potential and pedagogical effectiveness of temporary faculty.

Two years into a teaching fellowship at Kenyon College, I finally found a few colleagues that I can call friends. It’s a small town and an even smaller college, and yet it was surprisingly difficult for me to connect with the community. Perhaps this is because I knew it was temporary; it was yet another visiting teaching gig at yet another small liberal arts school, an underpaid non-tenure track position, and I’ll have to move at the end of my fourth semester — this semester. Or perhaps it’s my age — much has been written about the difficulty of making friends in one’s thirties, or as an adult of any age, particularly post-pandemic. Yet despite these odds, I made my way every Friday to meet a few colleagues at the only restaurant in town, for a cheap drink, gossip, and academic camaraderie.

We were all in a similar boat; all temporary faculty (Kenyon doesn’t use the word adjunct, rather — Visiting Assistant Professor or Teaching Fellow, although there isn’t much of a difference). Add to that the lonely detail that we are all “single” in Ohio — I have a partner who lives across the pond in the U.K., but that doesn’t alleviate the sense of isolation in this rural village. Most of our tenured colleagues are married, own homes in town, and have established social circles that exclude temporary faculty like us.

Almost two-thirds of faculty nationwide are adjuncts, and yet the experience is isolating and confusing. Disconnection and stress are common experiences for adjuncts, and although unionizing, organizing, and socializing seem like simple solutions, temporary faculty are often too overworked to set time aside for these potential solutions.

That’s why we met each week at the Village Inn. After we traded small talk about our classes and students, we dug in deeper — who had job interviews, who attended the faculty meeting and had the dirt on administrative decisions, college finances, the disproportionate salaries of the administrators compared to our own.

While “temporary faculty” members struggle to find a sense of financial stability, home and belonging, the upper administration, or what is often referred to as the “administrative bloat,” live in a different financial reality. Kenyon College’s 2022/2023 financial statements, audited and published by ProPublica, list the college president’s salary at $629,454. This has likely increased in recent years. Compare that to my current salary of $40,000. It is baffling that the salary for a temporary faculty member is less than half of a single student’s cost of attendance: the comprehensive fee for the 2025-26 academic year will be $89,600.

The above salary disparity presents one obvious solution: pay administrators less, pay teachers mor. Unfortunately, spending is swinging in the other direction, with universities diverting instructional spending toward “executive compensation,” particularly administrative salaries. This is also particularly infuriating given the recent budget cuts at colleges and universities nationwide.

Disconnection and stress are common experiences for adjuncts.

This year, I’ve learned through informal conversations about other temporary faculty members whose contracts were not renewed, as well as about budget cuts and slashed programs. The humanities are often slashed amid departmental closures and faculty lay-offs in higher education, and in certain institutions, the majority of cuts occur in global studies such as world literature and geography, indicating a trend toward right-wing and nationalistic values. Certainly, the sweeping cancellations to grants through the National Endowment for the Arts have and will continue to affect state-funded programs, community colleges, and professional development opportunities for humanities scholars.

These changes reverberate beyond the humanities, affecting the experience of students as well as faculty across all disciplines. For example, some of my favorite programs at Kenyon College were the interdisciplinary offerings of the Center for Innovative Pedagogy — a student-free center with workshops, meetings, book clubs, quiet study spaces, and free coffee for faculty and staff. Sadly, the Center for Innovative Pedagogy was abruptly dismantled at the end of this spring semester. The closure of the Center for Innovative Pedagogy was only one of many alarming and swift changes due to “budgetary concerns” this year. Current Kenyon College President Julie Kornfeld shared the unnerving news in an email to all employees: “I regret that, given the uncertainties of the broader environment, we are not able to offer a general salary increase next fiscal year. I recognize that this is disappointing news.” Disappointing is one way to put it.

For a few months, temporary faculty members like me were on the edges of our seats — we hadn’t received an offer to renew our year-by-year contracts and had no prospects at other institutions. One by one, we each found our next move: a one-year visiting fellowship at another university for my colleague in the English department; a seasonal directorial commission for my friend in the theater department. Meanwhile, I had a complicated decision to make. Quite late in the spring semester, Kenyon offered me another yearlong contract — which felt like an unpleasant option to kick the ball down the road, going nowhere.

My interdisciplinary position in science and nature writing has no imminent potential to transform into a tenure-track line, given that it sits between departments and has not even been given a concentration designation by the college. If I said yes, I would have to teach full time while also applying for future positions, which is exactly what I have already been doing for the past two years here. I am not exaggerating when I say that I have applied to at least a job every week for these two years, from academic to editorial to publication, practically any job that aligns with my experience. Maybe it really is time for me to return to the food service industry hustle of my early twenties. The extremely limited roles in creative writing are highly competitive, and although I’ve had a few interviews here and there, they have not yet manifested into any permanent offers. Ultimately, I decided to turn down Kenyon’s offer and choose instead… the grand unknown. The absence of a job. As scary as this seems, it feels better to me than remaining for yet another uncertain year.

So, I’ll pack up my boxes of books, my laptop, and my dog, and hit the road once again. Reflecting on my angry account of adjuncting during the pandemic at the age of 29, I am now nearly 35 and my path is no more clear or linear. Perhaps I’m not the Hanged Man tarot card, but rather, the Fool — prancing blindly toward a cliff’s edge with a little dog at my feet, a picnic bundle on one shoulder, and a little white flower in the other hand. I am finally walking away from academia and into a deeper unknown; a future filled with dogs, flowers, and food. That doesn’t sound so bad after all.